space tourism

Space Tourism is based on the idea that people want to make trips into space. Not people with the so-called 'right stuff', but ordinary people, probably slightly better off than average, but otherwise ordinary people.

People like zero-g. They like to float around; it's relaxing, unusual and fun. They like orbit even more, they can look down at the earth as it slides past. They can look up at the stars. They like the fact that they have an experience shared by few others.

Questionaires seem to confirm this view- a majority of people asked on the subject claim that they would actually pay significant amounts of money to make a journey into space; and people have offered to pay very large sums to go there; and Dennis Tito actually did it.

There is a wideranging, comprehensive survey that has been released at http://www.futron.com/spacetourism.

The current state:

Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth are the only two space tourists to have gone so far. The exact terms have not been revealed, but are believed to be about $15 million. SpaceShipOne has not launched any tourists as yet- all the pilots have been paid to be there. This is likely to change soon.

Let's examine why Russia is currently launching the tourists; rather than America. In Russia, their admittedly less capable rockets cost a tiny, tiny fraction of the NASA models- the $15 million would have paid for their flight to the ISS and back again as well as contributing to costs of flying the other 2 astronauts on each trip. The rocket itself is believed to have cost just $5 million (according to Gary Hudson of Rotary Rocket fame).

The low Russian costs relate to the low pay of engineers in that country; but also to some clever design and manufacturing decisions, for example their rockets use robotics in their construction, and their rockets are assembled horizontally. NASA has never been under much pressure to reduce the cost of launch vehicles; indeed pork barrel politics tends to push up the cost. NASA clearly needs to work harder on their cost structures, but if they did that, they would employ less people, and less votes would acrue to the politicans that fund NASA.

Interestingly Boeing is currently engaged in a joint venture called Sea Launch, using the cheap russian vehicle and Norwegian sea technology and Boeings other sales and technology. American space tourism proponents are fighting this trend, by trying to create non-governmental and presumably more efficient startups- most of which are doomed to fail, but some are likely to make it in the long-run.

The potential of space:

The cost of launching may eventually go as low as $200/lb; see Costs of Launching to Orbit. If it can reach these low levels with reliability then launch costs could be below $10 thousand; people would be able to spend long cruises in space in zero-g; watching the earth glide by.

Trips you might make

The likely tourism trips for the foreseeable future include:

short suborbital flights (a few minutes)

orbital stays (a week or more)

lunar (dark side of the moon) flyby

lunar landings/stays

mars trips (18 months minimum)

Future

The latest news is about SpaceShipOne, and how it can briefly enter space, giving more than three minutes of zero-g (6 times longer than parabolic flight). If things go to plan, based on this technology, Richard Branson's and Virgin Galactic are intending to offer routine flights into space for $200,000 within a few years time.

Beyond that, there are exotic designs for flying straight into orbit- Skylon for example; Space Elevators are looking more and more plausible (however Space Elevators for tourism have big safety issues due to the Van Allen belts, most tourism is likely to be in Low Earth Orbit for the foreseeable future), and there are plenty of conventional designs for rockets to go into orbit.

NASA has studied the idea of space tourism quite extensively,
and the summary of their investigations can be found in a lengthy
report entitled General Public Space Travel and Tourism (1997),
available (for time being) at:

The idea of space tourism suffers from a
"persistent lack of credibility"

The report was written five years ago and the few predictions it
offered -- "travel and tourism business interests are offering initial space trip services that could begin in the next few years" -- have
for most part come true. Still, the numbers required for wide-scale,
profitable space tourism remain depressingly far off:

An orbital trip should be achievable for $1-2 million, about 100 times
less than a Space Shuttle flight

An overall safety of 0.9999+ is required, about 100 times safer
than the Shuttle

Even after reaching these a trip will cost about $50000 per passanger

A more optimistic assessment, albeit a rather scathing one towards
the inaction of government space agencies, can be found at
http://www.spacefuture.org/tourism/.

Tito's route remains the only option if you want to get into
space as a pure tourist, and with two tourists now
having proven that it is possible there has been much
media speculation about the next visitors --
one oft-mentioned name is Lance Bass from the boy
band N'Sync. Image World Media is also planning
to fly two game show winners to the ISS sometime
in 2003.

And, unfortunately, that is pretty much it at the moment,
although there are a few ways to pretend you are in space.
Some jet fighters, like the MiG-25 Foxbat, can fly at an altitude
of over 25,000 meters, high enough to see the curvature of the
earth. (Estimated price tag: $12,000 per flight.) Another option is
simulated zero-gravity flights, where a jet flies in an steep reverse
arc providing a whopping 30 seconds of microgravity; one flight with
8-12 of these hops will set you back about $5000.

Pretty much the only serious space travel agency at the moment
is Space Adventures, which has handled both Tito's and Shuttleworth's
flights and also offers all the activities listed above.

There are now so many competitors for the X Prize
that one of them may actually manage the trick some day not too far
off in the future, namely,
reaching a suborbital altitude of 100 km twice in 14 days with
the same ship. (See commercial space flight for some of the
contenders.) Space Adventures plans to offers suborbital flights
starting in 2003-2005 for $98000 a pop and is already taking reservations;
some of the contractors are claiming prices as low as $50000.

SPACEHAB, an American contractor for the ISS that
was responsible for the Spacehab module currently in use
as crew quarters, is busily designing the Enterprise,
which is not just a clever in-joke but
the world's first commercial inhabited space structure.
If all goes according to plan, the Enterprise will be
added to the ISS in 2005. While the primary use
will probably be for long-term experiments, reading
between the lines, it appears that use of the structure for
other purposes might be possible as well; after all,
there is exactly one use for space
multimedia that is guaranteed to draw an audience.

However, quite possibly the most exciting development in space tourism
these days comes from MirCorp, the original mastermind behind
Tito's flight, which has signed an apparently
entirely serious deal with Rosaviacosmos, the Russian space agency,
and RSC Energia, the main contractor for the Mir and much of the ISS,
to build a small commercial space station that would accommodate
three people for up to 20 days, tentatively entitled Mini Station 1
and scheduled for commercial operations in 2004.

NASA's report didn't even bother considering options for tourism
beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO), but moving down into the
"don't hold your breath"
category, the Artemis Project is working on detailed plans for
colonizing the Moon.
Actual achievements so far seem to be limited to a few rather dinky
VRML models of the planned moonbase though, and funding seems
equally dubious.

Oddly enough, the technically far more challenging task of going
to Mars seems to have a more serious group, the Mars Society,
behind it. Mars Society has gotten its act together well enough
to be presently conducting two simultaneous experiments on
simulating life on Mars, one for arctic conditions on Devon Island
in Nunavut, northern Canada, and the other for desert conditions
in southern Utah, USA. Still, the Mars Society's goals are
also distinctly more modest (or should that be realistic?),
mainly conducting Mars-related research and pressuring NASA and
other national space agencies into doing a manned flight.

And finally, barring immense scientific breakthroughs, interstellar
flight and terraforming other planets just isn't going to
happen in our lifetime, although there are plenty of websites out
there that would love to tell you otherwise...